Looking for a decent Hebrew font, I stumbled across a fascinating page about an un-decent Hebrew font, Hugh Schonfeld's reformed Hebrew script, proposed in the 1930s and long since forgotten, which looks like the half-mad love child of Hebrew and Roman letters.
This is one of those labour-of-love little web pages on an obscure subject that I just love. The author has an excellent list of tongue-in-cheek justifications for even caring about this script.
- You can impress your linguistics professor with an example of how not to design a writing system.
- It is wierd and creepy enough to be good for writing gothic poetry in Hebrew.
- Writing sensitive files in Schonfieldian will drive industrial spies crazy.
- Hebrew/Assyrian has too many holy associations for writing profane and vulgar loanwords.
- Whenever they need a sign printed for a linguistics convention, people will think of you first.
- You can punish your children by making them write long essays on type design in Schonfieldian.
- It will make you very popular among Hebrew-speaking geeks.
- Schonfieldian will scare your parents.
- You can make a lot of money by creating and selling documents allegedly from a parallel universe.
- Because all the glyphs have no seperated pieces, they work better as noodles in alphabet soup.
- You know you want to.
- All the cool kids are doing it.
- Chicks dig it, dude!
Since I know for a fact that there are chicks — hot chicks — reading this blog who will in fact dig Schonfeldian Hebrew typography (and you know who you are!) allow me to suggest that y'all ping an email out to the page's author, Barry “Iguanaman”; Adelman. Tell him I sent ya.
This Hebrew loving chick digs it.
ReplyDeleteBut shouldn't Hugh be able to spell in English as a prerequisite to making fun of this script? "wierd" ?? "seperate" ??
ReplyDeleteAs an ex-hot chick, it was hard enough to learn how to write in traditional Hebrew all of those years ago; this, although interesting, would be more then i could handle. Thanks for the link - it is fun.
ReplyDeleteI's Mom
I's mom remains a hot Hebrew-lovin' chick no matter what she says!
ReplyDeleteI never learned much Hebrew except for a few prayers but Reya can attest to the fact that I talk like a New Yorkah so that might count for something.
And, Reya......Miniver is unphased by misspellings. Probably because time spent on what he considers a trivial matter is better spent finding esoteric information for all of us to enjoy.
Love you, J.........
Mom